Dick Cheney: A small-town boy who messed up big

AP Photo/Harry HamburgFormer Vice President Dick Cheney When you drive through Illinois on the Interstate, you can’t miss the signs directing you to Ronald Reagan’s childhood home. Both that house and the building in which he was born are national historic sites.

But just try finding Dick Cheney’s old home in Wyoming.

I did so last week as I was driving across the country. I figured I’d stop in the town of Casper to do a bit of research into the big question of 21st century politics: Why did Dick Cheney go wobbly?

When Cheney ascended to the vice-presidency in 2001, he was assumed by even his enemies to be a Reagan-like realist, an old-fashioned conservative who would favor using American military power sparingly and only when it was possible to achieve quick and overwhelming victory.

Instead, he got taken in by the cult of so-called "neo" conservatives and embraced their fantasies of endless nation-building in hostile places. Nothing could be more symbolic of the difference between Reagan and Cheney than the issue President Obama will be addressing today, Afghanistan. Reagan managed to get the Soviet Union bogged down there for years. As for Cheney, he managed to get the United States bogged down there for years. He got us bogged down in Iraq, too, also with no strategic advantage for the United States.

That’s a lot of screwing up for a small-town boy. I figured I might gain some insight into Cheney’s otherwise inexplicable behavior by poking around a bit in Casper, the small town where Cheney attended high school after his father moved the family from Nebraska.

My first problem was how to find the place. In Illinois, you can follow a well-marked Reagan Trail that goes through 13 towns all eager to claim a connection to him. In Casper, no one seemed to know how to get to the old Cheney estate. It took an Internet search to direct me to the subdivision of identical one-story houses with two-car garages where he grew up. I had to ask around a bit to find the yellow home where Cheney lived when he was captain of the high-school football team.

That neighbor was a few years younger than Cheney and had grown up in town as well. He gave me a simple explanation of what Casper was and is all about: Oil. Its nickname is "the Oil City" and the town has been a regional center of the oil industry for more than a century.

It’s easy to see how a kid who grew up in a place like this would think it perfectly logical to ascend into the hierarchies of both oil and politics without perceiving that those interests might sometimes conflict. And how such a man might see it as perfectly natural for the United States government to assume responsibility for sorting out the oil regions of the world.

But the fatal flaw in Cheney’s character, if I may presume to deduce it, did not derive from his ties to the oil industry. It had much more to do with his overly emotional response to the 9/11 attacks. If Cheney had been the cold realist he pretends to be, his approach to al Qaeda would not have changed a whit after those planes hit those buildings. The threat was no greater on 9/12 than on 9/10 and the duty of the executive branch was to act calmly on the intelligence concerning that threat, which was ample.

Instead, Cheney panicked. If his own words are any indication, Cheney obsessed over the threat of terrorists smuggling nukes into U.S. cities and concluded that this required invasions and occupations of any country that could be even remotely conceived to be planning such an operation.

The pre-9/11 Dick Cheney seemed a lot smarter. When he was defense secretary under the first President Bush, Cheney agreed with his boss that a takeover of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War would not have been "prudent," as his boss used to say.

"Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it," Cheney said at the time. But after that later, less-prudent President Bush made him the de facto commander-in-chief, Cheney decided that taking Baghdad would be simple and did not require much in the way of post-invasion planning. The kid from Casper thus made the biggest unforced error in modern military history.

Cheney doesn’t see it that way. His recent rantings indicate his only regret is that he didn’t get us bogged down in Iran as well. By this evening, however, Afghanistan will officially be Obama’s war. The Republicans will have no option but a return to the realism of the Reagan years.

As for that yellow house in Casper, I don’t expect to see a sign on the Interstate pointing it out anytime soon.